Newt Gingrich CPAC 2012 Speech: Here’s the Meat! Video Transcript

Here’s the meat! In the following video (with a partial, loose transcript) of Newt Gingrich’s speech at CPAC lays out his plan. You have not heard this kind of detail from any of the candidates, at any time, anywhere. Tell me, if you are conservative, what you find fault in, in these words. I believe he is capable of doing everything he promises if we have a Conservative Senate.

Newt Gingrich

Pull-Out Quotes:

Really serious change. I have only one measurement for what I’m about to tell you. I want the establishment to understand up-front – this is not about fairness, this is not about being revenue neutral. This is about maximizing economic growth to put us back to work and to create the most dynamic economy on the planet, to rebuild our manufacturing base, so we pull away from China, and become once again the dominate country on the planet in economic terms…

And here’s what I want to say to the establishment, who is going to jump up and say, “this is not revenue neutral.” They are right. This is called a tax cut. I have a simple principle – this is going to become a huge argument inside the Republican Party – I worked and helped balance the federal budget for 4 consecquitve years – the only 4 years in your life time, so when people are saying Gingrich is being irresponsible, none of the people saying they have ever balanced the federal budget, we’ll get a federal budget balanced, but I have a single principle. My intention is to shrink spending down to the level of revenue, not raise revenue up to the level of Obama’s spending…

Never again shall we pay someone 99 weeks for doing nothing. In 99 weeks you can earn an Associate Degree. think about the total waste of human capability when you teach people to sit at home for 99 weeks. It is fundamentally wrong and a violation of the Declaration of Independence that we have the right to pursue happiness.

Begin loose, partial transcript:

…CPAC was founded to challenge the Republican establishment. When Ronald Reagan came her in 1974 and give his famous speech on bold colors, no pale pastels, that was a decade-in from Reagan’s first national speech for Barry Goldwater, A Time for Choosing. When Reagan campaigned in 1980, you could see the gap between the Republican establishment and the Conservative movement. Reagan campaigned on supply side economics, lower taxes, less regulation, more American energy, praise for people who created jobs. The establishment called it voo-doo economics.

The GOP establishment has a single word they use with contempt for conservative ideas. They say they are unrealistic, so creating 16 MILLION jobs under Reagan – unrealistic. Ending the Soviet Union, unrealistic.

Faith Wittlesley [read it here], who was in the Reagan White House and then Ambassador to Sweden, wrote a brilliant piece recently for NewsMax, pointing out that the fight she and I were in was conservatives against the Republican establishment, over the very question of whether or not we have an anti-Soviet campaign.

The 1994 Contract with America…unrealistic. The House Republican Majority of 1994, which by the way, was elected by the largest one-party increase in an off-year in American history – 9 MILLION new voters. Unrealistic.

Reforming welfare so that two out of three people would go to work or go to school – unrealistic.

Cutting taxes with the largest capital gains tax cut, first tax cut in 16 years, unemployment drops to 4.2%, 11 MILLION new jobs – unrealistic.

Four years of a balanced budget. Unrealistic.

For the Republican establishment managing the decay is preferable to changing the trajectory, because changing the trajectory requires real fights, and requires a real willingness to roll up your sleeves and take on the Left. That’s why the Republican establishment, whether it’s 1996 or 2008, can’t win a presidential campaign – because they don’t have the toughness, they don’t have the commitment, and they don’t have the philosophy necessary to build a majority in this country.

The Republican establishment in this city [Washington DC] – crony capitalism in Congress is fully as bad as crony capitalism on Wall Street, and they had better clean up the Congress if they expect to be re-elected.

CPAC represents a 50-year struggle that goes back to the Draft Goldwater movement in 1962, and the Tea Party vs the Republican establishment, is in many ways the same fight. This has been going on for a half-century. The core of it is very simple: the Conservative Movement, when it offers bold solutions to rally millions of Americans – not just Republicans – millions of Americans, Democrats, Independents, people who have never been in politics before, then it wins decisively. 1980, 1984, 1994 are examples of that.

Today I want to talk about bold solutions to get American working again. I’m going to contrast it with the timidity that comes from managing the decay. Two examples: we won the Second World War from December 7, 1941 to August 1945. Lock this into your heads. This is an example of what America can do when you unleash the American people. In 44 months, 3 years and 8 months, we defeated Nazi German, Fascist Italy and Imperialist Japan. Forty-four months. Recently it took 23 years to add a fifth runway to the Atlanta airport.

When people say, you really can’t control the border by January 1, 2014, they are describing the America that can’t. That’s the establishment’s America – tied up in bureaucracy, tied up in red tape, tied up in incompetence, tied up in interest groups.

Let me be very clear, all of you have seen the Washington establishment and the Wall Street establishment pile on top of me. All of you have seen then say things that were just profoundly false, and there is a good reason they are doing it.

This campaign is a mortal threat to their grip on the establishment, because we intend to change Washington, not accommodate it…

There is a world that works. Most of it, but not all of it is in the private sector, and there is a world that fails, most of it, but all of it, is in the public sector. I’ll give you one single example: How many of you have ever gone online to check a package at UPS or FedEx? (most of audience holds up hands)

I want to drive this home. This is not a theory. It is a practical reality that we have the technology that enables us to track between UPS and FedEx – we track 24 MILLION packages a day, while they are moving, and we allow you to find out where they are for free. That’s the world that works.

Now here’s the world that fails: the federal government today cannot find 11 MILLION illegal immigrants, even if they are sitting still. [Huge applause – for the first time Newt smiles]. Now I have a simple proposal. We send a package to everyone who is here illegally. When they open it, we pull it up on the computer. We know where they are.

Let me say for my friends in the news media, that was hyperbole and we don’t need a fact check. [Huge applause and some boos]

I’m going to give you a series of solutions that are big enough to get America back on the right track, and I think this has been the greatest challenge of this campaign. We have lots of bickering. We have lots of argument – we have virtually no discussion of what does it really take, to take the most complicated society in the world, the largest economy in the world, and move it back to being the most successful, most prosperous and safest country in the world, so I’m going to try to set a stage for that. We have tons of details at Newt.org – you’ll see an immense amount of material…

Let me start with jobs. If I am the nominee, with your help, I will ask the entire Republican ticket to campaign with me, on the pledge, that when the Congress comes in on January 3rd, it will stay in session, and by January 20th, when I am sworn in, we will have repealed ObamaCare. [Huge applause]

It will have repealed Dodd-Frank. It will have repealed Sarbanes-Oxley.

All three of those are job-killing bills which centralize bureaucracy in Washington DC and increase the corruption of the political system. All three should be repealed and held at the desk until I am sworn in. That afternoon, on the very first day we should sign the repeal of all three. That’s a reasonable start. [Huge applause]

Two hours after the inaugural address I will begin signing Executive Orders and Presidential Signings – all of which will have been published by October 1st. The country will know precisely what this campaign is about. The very first Executive Order will abolish all of the White House Czars as of that moment. [Huge, huge applause]

We will sign that day an Executive Order, that as of that moment, approves the Canadian Pipeline to Houston – period. My message to Prime Minister Harper and the Canadian Government, is simple: you do not need a partnership with the Chinese. Give the American people a few months, when we beat Obama on election night, you can start buying equipment, because we will approve it on January 20th.

There will be an Executive Order to approving putting the US Embassy in Jerusalem on that day. Period. [Huge applause]

We will on that day reinstate Ronald Reagan’s Mexico City Policy – no money for abortions overseas. Period.

We will have an Executive Order to repeal every act of Obama religious bigotry on that day. Period.

My goal is that by the time President Obama lands in Chicago, we will have repudiated 40% of his government, on the first day.

I want to talk now about how to create jobs. America works when Americans are working. The number one theme of the Fall campaign will be a pay check president vs a food stamp president. I believe we will win that fight by a huge margin. In President Reagans years we created 16 MILLION jobs. I worked with President Clinton, and in those 4 years we created 11 MILLION jobs, and got down to 4.2% unemployment.

Really serious change. I have only one measurement for what I’m about to tell you. I want the establishment to understand up-front – this is not about fairness, this is not about being revenue neutral. This is about maximizing economic growth to put us back to work and to create the most dynamic economy on the planet, to rebuild our manufacturing base, so we pull away from China, and become once again the dominate country on the planet in economic terms.

How do we do that? First, we eliminate the Capital Gains tax. Zero Capital Gains for all investments in the U.S. [Huge applause]

Second: we go to 100% expensing so all new equipment at every level, farmer, factory, doctor, business – all of it gets written off in one year.

The goal is to make the American system, the most modern, the most productive in the world.

Also, if you are going to modernize the equipment, you want to modernize the work force. Unemployment compensation should be changed so that in order to get compensation, you sign up for a business-led training program, so we are modernizing our work force.

Never again shall we pay someone 99 weeks for doing nothing. In 99 weeks you can earn an Associate Degree. think about the total waste of human capability when you teach people to sit at home for 99 weeks. It is fundamentally wrong and a violation of the Declaration of Independence that we have the right to pursue happiness.

If we are serious about manufacturing, we have to eliminate the EPA, which is a job-killing agency. We should replace it with a new Environmental Solutions Agency, made up of new people, and the number one requirment should be common sense.

They should also have to take into account economics. The idea that at the highest gas prices we have had, they are looking at regulations that would raise the price of gasoline 25 cents a gallon, tells you how utterly, totally irrational the EPA is today, and why we should replace it with a new agency. Not try to reform it, because the people in it have been self-selected to be radicals, who are anti-business, anti-local control, and seek to dictate to America.

We also need a 21st Century Food and Drug Administration whose job is really simple. Be in the laboratory. Understand the science and accellerat getting it to the patient so that we save as many lives as possible, as rapidly as possible and in the process, we create hundres of thousands of new jobs dominating the world market in health care.

We need a 12.5% tax rate. That’s the Irish tax rate. It makes us incredibly competitive in the world. It brings home $700 BILLION in profits that are locked up overseas. It enables our companies to compete and I say to my Liberal friends – General Electric will actually pay taxes.

We should abolish the Death Tax permanently, because it is an immoral tax. You know, when Governor Romney released his taxes, the Liberals were shocked. He was only paying 15%. Their answer was to raise his taxes. I’m a conservative. I believe the goal should be to get your taxes down to 15%. Now, how do you do that? We have in my plan something we got from Hong Kong, care of Steve Forbes. Hong Kong has had for years a two-track system: you can keep the current code, all the red tape, all the deductions, all the forms, or you can fill in one page: here’s how much I earned, here’s how many dependents, here’s 15%.

And here’s what I want to say to the establishment, who is going to jump up and say, “this is not revenue neutral.” They are right. This is called a tax cut. I have a simple principle – this is going to become a huge argument inside the Republican Party – I worked and helped balance the federal budget for 4 consecutive years – the only 4 years in your life time, so when people are saying Gingrich is being irresponsible, none of the people saying they have ever balanced the federal budget, we’ll get a federal budget balanced, but I have a single principle. My intention is to shrink spending down to the level of revenue, not raise revenue up to the level of Obama’s spending.

This is the fight we had in 1984 when we put in the “no tax increase” platform, which I worked on with Jack Kemp…, against the establishment. We are not the tax collectors for the welfare state. We are not assigned the job of going out to raise extra money so Liberals can give it away. We are interested in a tax code that creates jobs, that maximizes freedom, that gives you a chance to take care of your family, your neighborhood, your charities, your church or synagogue, and that’s a fundamentally different model than the establishment model that is oriented toward government. We will not tax the American people for Barack Obama’s credit card.

So how do we get to a balanced budget then? You cut spending. You cut taxes to maximize economic growth, you reform government and you use American energy.

At 4.2% unemployment, which is the rate at which I left office, Social Security is safe for a generation, a huge increase in revenue and a big decline in cost. You take people off of food stamps, off of Medicaid, off of public housing, off of unemployment, off of welfare. You put them to work paying taxes, the government gets increased revenue by more people paying taxes, and the government spends less – the first big step to balance the budget.

Let’s talk about cutting spending. We should replace the 130-year-old civil service system and regulations, with a new model, under new management, using systems like Lean Six Sigma and we should be prepared to save $500 BILLION A YEAR in the operation of federal government, and increase the economy by at least $2 TRILLION a year by simply making the government cease to be incompetent, inefficient and a hindrance to the future of the American system.

We should look at every single agency, and start with abolishing the Department of Energy, which has been a total failure since it was founded.

Apply the system of American Express, Visa, MasterCard to cut out fraud. We can save $60 BILLION to $110 BILLION, a year, in Medicare and Medicaid alone by going to modern systems that work, almost a TRILLION dollars in one decade, in just that one zone.

We should apply the Tenth Amendment – Governor Rick Perry has agreed to head up a project to develop this summer for a contract this Fall, and for a bill in January, a Tenth Amendment implementation to return power back home.

We have an obligation to open up the American system to produce the maximum amount of oil and gas for three reasons: keeping the $500-$600 BILLION here at home strengthens our economy. If we maximize production our goal should be to get back to $2.00/gallon gas to prove to the American people that the free market works in a practicable way, that affects your life. this isn’t pie-in-the-sky. This is supply and demand. When you realize that North Dakota alone has 25 times as much energy as the US Geological Survey thought 8 years ago, 25 times as much, and we are not allowed to look at Alaska where we own 69%, nearly 1.5 times the size of Texas, we don’t look offshore.

Obama has been an anti-American energy president and every American pays the price every time they go to a gas station.

We want to insure that no future president, ever again, bows to a Saudi King. Period. [Huge applause]

We need to move towards a personal savings account for social security for young Americans, while taking Social Security off-budget for Senior citizens. We need to make sure no politician ever again lies to Seniors by threatening to keep from them checks they earned and deserve, because the trust fund is there, even if there is no trust in Barack Obama.

We need a complete audit of the Federal Reserve to find out every decision – we deserve to know who got our money and why. If Bernanke has not resigned by the day I am sworn in, I will ask Congress to pass a law ending his term.

We need a commission on gold and solid currency much like the one Ronald Reagan had in 1981, and I am delighted that Lou Lehrman and Jim Grant have agreed to be the chairmen.

I will close on two big topics. Very important, and not about the economy. First, this administration is waging war on religion, but so are the courts. This is why we need a movement that is bigger than just beating Obama. We need a movement that understands that we are going to change the Congress, the White House, the bureaucracy, and where necessary the courts. We all need to understand how real this is. This country was founded by people who came here in order to avoid religious persecution. Our core document says we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights and Barack Obama seeks to cut across those and I don’t care what deal he tries to cut, this a man who is deeply committed…if he wins re-election, he will wage war on the Catholic Church the morning after he is re-elected. We cannot trust him. We know who he really is. We must make sure the country knows who he really is.

For a real bold solution: Check my website Newt.org for a detailed paper on how to re-balance the judiciary [9 years in the making] and how to reestablish the right of the people to protect themselves against dictatorial judges who are rewriting the constitution rather than enforcing the constitution. It’s a very serious topic.

Finally, this is an administration who lies about who our enemies are. Who refuses to tell the truth about what threatens us, is blind to the dangers we are running, seeks to weaken radically our defense system, has crippled our intelligence system and is making a series of decisions around the world that are stunning in their misunderstanding in the nature of their reality. Today we have Americans held hostage in Egypt, precisely like the hostage crisis during the Carter administration. Today we have the person who helped us find bin Laden has been arrested by the Pakistani government. What more do you need to know? They didn’t say, this is terrific. You helped to find the most wanted terrorist in the world. They said this is terrible. How could you help the Americans?

We need a profound national debate about our entire policy and it needs to start by telling the truth about radical Islamists who seek to kill us.

The real meat is how many times he has turned his back on conservatism. Why does he serve on the board of bailed out GE’s Healthymagination with Tom Daschle, a company posed to make billions from Obamacare? Why does he sit on a couch with Nancy Pelosi and push cap and trade taxes and global warming?

When I first heard theory of global warming I thought it sounded viable, if not inevitable… the idea we’d run out of air to ruin is not all that far fetched

Only once the fraudulent nature of the science and the true agenda of the Left in all this (taxation, control of private enterprise) became apparent did I realize it was indeed a fraud… for me that was 2008

I trust Mr Gingrich has taken a similar journey to the truth, you sure don’t hear him talking about it anymore

Maggie . . . Newt is a fascinating fellow. Very smart, ambitious and capable. His programs as outlined are exactly what might (?) help America get back on the exceptional road. The entire world needs the traditional integrity and charity that America stands for. Can we recover our heritage? Frankly, Mr. Obama and others of the far left have managed to damage, and in some cases destroy, the fabric of our existance at home and abroad. Perhaps the destruction is so severe that we can not recover. I, for one, don’t think we’ve reached that stage. Newt, bless his Irish malarky, has all of the qualifications to be a formidable Conservative leaning President – except one. INTEGRITY. Personally, I think this fundamental character flaw is enough to prohibit his consideration for the Presidency. . . . Bump

Newt has proposed a comprehensive set pf plans that will turn our country back to prosperity, strength and freedom starting by repudiating at least 40% of Obama’s government ON THE FIRST DAY.

It’s all in this speech. Watch this speech AND DECIDE FOR YOURSELF.

Do you believe in FREEDOM AND OUR RIGHTS as set forth in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers?

If you believe in your freedom and rights as an American Citizen, this speech will tell you EXACTLY what we are going to do to RESTORE our rights and the prosperity, freedom and strength of our country. EXACTLY the plan.

This focusing on the mote in Newt’s eye is very unseemly, gentlemen.

This is the most important election in — what? — a hundred years? Get a clue.

Newt’s plan is there and nothing can stop you if you want to save our country. FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF AND MAKE UP YOUR OWN MIND.